Brawl for All : Personal Autoincludes

Happy post Brawl Thursday! I’m actually behind on articles for sure, I owe you beautiful people a trip report, deck article, and another trip report, those will come out soon in one superlarge sandwich article. So on to Today’s subject: AUTOINCLUDES.

If you’ve come this far we are already thinking with 57 card brains. But being a decades-long Brawl player I definitely find myself adding a lot of the same cards over and over so I figured I would share them with you now so that you can “level up” your game. I do have a strict list of criteria though, these will be brought to us by criteriahashi.

AT MOST MONOCOLORED:

I want these to be able to slot into as many decks as possible, therefore we don’t want to restrict it further than we have to. Quite preferable to only have one colored mana symbol as well. Colorless is even better.

GOOD AT ALL POINTS OF THE GAME:

Obviously this won’t ring true for everything. But I prefer things that are good early or late, and from behind, at neutral, or when ahead. I mean if we gonna call them autoincludes they should be well, AUTOMATICALLY good right? This also leads us to.

NO STUPID MANA COSTS:

We don’t want stuff that is just gonna sit in your hand like the trashest of garbage. These cards should be able to naturally flow with your regular gameplay not sit there like some got dang cardboard albatross.

Most of these are going to be answers (both proactive and reactive) because the thing I hate the most is not being able to deal with something. Questions are easy enough to find, and it is easier in glorious Brawl than degenerate edh mostly because a lot of the horribly horrible design mistakes did not make their way into standard. Like we don’t have nasty hexproof generals with 25 different equipments on them or anything like that. So, because they may as well be their own category. We’ll go head and do white, general cycles nonsense, and colorless today.

ALMOST ANY PWALKER IN THE COLOR

This one also easily breaks the monocolored only rule. Brawl is like a NR20 game of Starcraft. While you can be white hot aggressive sometimes, in general the games are going to be slower so where you can get your main advantage is being able to generate consistent value with no mana cost. Thomas Paineswalkers do this by their very nature so they are probably the most important card type in brawl, as they are in every other format (thanks brady doormouth). While being only slightly hyperboelic a lot of times you can gauge who is going to win the game by how many pw activations the player has done.

This is especially true of the one sided static hoser ability planeswalkers that infest war of the spark like termites. Even if they aren’t worthwhile in every matchup, most brawl games do tend to see a lot of the same interactions so you’ll generally get in the way of at least one thing oppo is doing.

THE LEYLINES (NOT YOU GREEN ONE)

This does break the double colored mana symbol rule, but in general they are useful in enough matchups that even if you don’t get to fart them out on turn 1 they prove quite useful. These are kinda garbo to rip from the top if you are behind though.

Imagine that though, a green card being trash, it is just too deck dependent/requires butt amounts of mana to do anything.

Ok onto the real things, I hope to have at least one for each color, also while some are painfully obvious I will try to at least show off a couple hidden gems in the vast Brawl cardpool.

WHITE

Pacifism/Arrest Effects

The best way to take care of a troublesome general in Brawl, as opposed to EDH, is to neuter it on the battlefield as opposed to killing it. The way Brawl games play out they will almost always be able to keep casting it over and over , especially bad if they are Golosing you (they likely are). So you want to leave them mostly useless in some way or another, and aura based removal is a decent way to do so. Enchantments tend to be a harder to deal with permanent type with some colors having legit no way to do so. If I am mono-white I run the entire grip of them, but one I always include is

99% of the time the thing I really care about is killing their ability to fire off well, abilities (lookin at you Golos). At one mana this just so easily slots into the regular course of the game that it is my favorite card of this ilk. Yes they still get to attack you but you have a hardy 25 life total (30 in multiplayer)so it is fine to take a hit or two. Also the main thing we want to do if you recall is KEEP THEM ON THE BOARD and that means that Can’t block is much preferable to can’t Attack so that you are still free to hit the plebian red zone if you must. Hands down great card as far as I’m concerned.

Taxing/Prison/Being a butt effects

Being able to disrupt your opponent and make them stumble is rather key (which is why the first thing you do in starry craft is attack their mineral line, known as the tiberium highway in command and conquer i bet). I don’t even bother caring if this hurts myself as well. I am still always going to slot them in because I expect it and they don’t. Also sometimes you’ll run into red/blue and it is killer against them. Admittedly last night I ran a turn 1 deafening silence against someone running Niv and it took them a solid minute almost to keep the turn moving. Im assuming there was a long audible groan. Also this falls in line with our walker plan because you can keep getting spell effects while not casting anything. They are truly the isochron sceptres of Brawl.

RHYSTIC TITHE

Speaking of disruption, there have been games where I get this out early and people are afraid of my nonexistent ramp plans and actually keep dinging themselves for at least two mana a turn. I of course get to sit calmly and know that there is no way I’m actually gonna use most of the treasure tokens anyway. Again this is really bad when behind but can be clutch if say there is a brolas that keeps making you sac stuff every turn.

ARTYFACTS

WITCH STOVE (if using a creature el henerale)

Even if I’m not chaining recursion things, I always wanna have the old easybake at the ready. Remember Up above where I talked about aura based removal being the best? Or those dumb blue cards that turn your muscled dude into garbage? The easiest way to get them back into your general zone is obviously to sac them off. So for a scant one colorless you have an answer to some of their most annoying answers.

And honestly the card I’ve seen be the most useful in my brawl times as of late, I hadn’t thought of running it for the most part.

MYSTIC FORGE

I’ve been running this even if the only targets I have are Ugin and Stonecoil (well and oven lately). Being able to cast from the library is cool and all (don’t donk like I did and have cage out though. Grafdigger’s cage gets an honorable mention but I never know when it is what I really need or not so I keep running it out and it hoses my forgeness) but just the value I’ve got from pingscryxile (exiling while also taking a damage) has actually been something that I’ve come to treasure. It is truly the sensei’s divining top of brawl. It is great at neutral, decent while ahead, and can be pretty useful when behind as long as NOT TOO FAR behind since the life can add up, maybe just like, they have a dude and you don’t levels of behind. Also has the scare factor of the opponent thinking that they are about to face mono brown when in fact it is just there to churn through your deck. One of my favorite things is always to make the opponent think I am doing something when because of my skill and metaknowledge ways I am totally not gonna do that. It is like when you play Eddie in ggxx and they think 100 unblockables are coming their way but jokes on them because you can’t even execute it.

WELL HOPEFULLY you’ve had a good time and maybe had one minor takeaway from this my white and colorless and cycles autoincludes magnum bropus. Until next time, hope to see you on the brawl pitch.